Posts Tagged ‘Let’s Blather All Over’

Wasteland 2’s beta is officially go! Well, for backers anyway. I booted it up the second Steam finished prying it from some server’s synthetic grip, and I realized something: I was nervous. My expectations were riding extremely high, and I couldn’t help but fear that inXile’s return to post-apocalyptic role-playing’s roots would let me down. What I’d seen up to that point had my head ready to explode like a gerbil full of uncooked rice (and also a blood sausage), but maybe it wouldn’t all come together. Maybe it was pure promise and no execution. All bark, zero bite.

I was worried over nothing. Wasteland 2’s irradiated peaks and valleys are pretty rad so far. I have some minor quibbles (the interface is awkward, enemy AI can be really dumb, some bugs and glitches), but there’s quite a lot to like here. Watch me play through a few early sections below. Oh, and fair warning: slight spoilersahead. Nothing too major, though.

They told me I was crazy. They told me my head wasn’t screwed on right – that it was all nuts and bolts rattling around inside. They claimed my ideas were “laughably lethal” and “wait no I’m not laughing anymore because a prototype of one of your ideas is currently running me over and shooting me at the same time.” But Scraps – a build-your-own wheeled guncar monstrosity game that’s now on Kickstarter – will let me show them all. Oh yes. My colleagues at the Lego Racers and Kerbal Space Program University of Engineering, an Ivy League institution, won’t even know what hit ‘em. Well, at least once I make my car do the thing where its wheels stay on the ground and not, um, anywhere else. I took some video of my attempts for your amusement and – ahem – educational enrichment. You can view that below.

Halloween weekend is upon is, and that can only mean one thing: it is time for unrelenting spookiness. No matter where you go, you can’t escape it. Bats will shriek, pumpkins will leer, and the sky will basically be made of lightning. Also, everyone you know will try to kill you. By giving you too much candy, which will ultimately result in diabetes if you give in to peer pressure and partake of hedonistic holiday sugar consumption. So naturally, as a public service (of sorts), RPS must do its part. Thus, I have elected to play three of the scariest games of all time in rapid succession, testing the limits of my psyche and intestinal fortitude for your amusement. What lies ahead? Push on the implausibly creaky door and go below for a video of gaming’s darkest, dankest, murderer-iest basements.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is a game I’ve been watching with great interest ever since Thirty Flights Of Loving creator Brendon Chung first debuted it last year. It’s about hacking, but not via irritating minigames or jargon-your-problems-away Hollywood magic. Instead, you learn basic (albeit fictional) code and take down everything from laser grids to gun emplacements with a twitch of your fingers and a wriggle of your brain. It’s already an extremely clever game, and it’s quite empowering despite the fact that you play as someone who probably couldn’t even heft an assault rifle – let alone fire one. Basically, it’s a wonderfully novel idea – more Neuromancer than Deus Ex – but words only do it so much justice. Thus, I’ve decided to play it for your enrichment, in hopes that you will understand why Quadrilateral should be driving your radar haywire.

Daikatana is now available on Steam! Also, I hate myself. Therefore, what better occasion is there for me to try out the infamous first-person flop for the very first time? That’s right: in the following video, you get to experience my first moments of Daikatana with me. John Romero and co’s ambitious yet ultimately gravely flawed pet project has quite a dubious reputation, but it has its fair share of defenders as well. Maybe I’ll… enjoy it? Appreciate it on some abstract level? Get so angry and frustrated that my eyeballs pop out of my head from the sheer rage pressure building inside my noggin? Who knows. Let’s find out together! Because why not?

We brought you word of Retro/Grade creator Matt Gilgenbach’s Neverending Nightmares a while back, and the pitch definitely didn’t tiptoe lightly on the heartstrings. In short, Gilgenbach has spent his whole life struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder and depression, and when Retro/Grade’s reverse-shmup antics only succeeded in rewinding money right out of his bank account, his personal demons began haunting him worse than ever. Neverending Nightmares is a psychological horror game born of those miserable experiences, an attempt by Gilgenbach to both expel and explore them. With the game’s Kickstarter winding down (and still in need of a bit more aid), I thought I’d play through its gruesomely gorgeous demo and discover just what sort of darkness lies inside. Also, I am a whimpering coward and I waited until nighttime to record. Inevitably, I start freaking out and babbling to myself like a lunatic, as all sensible, sane adults do in order to keep calm. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go find a corner and just, er, breathe for a while. Yeah, that sounds nice.

I decided to attempt some form of Let’s Play/Blather All Over/Preview thing, and well, I’m new to this. Very, very new. The end result is a mixture of description and discovery that hopefully gets the job done, but with “ums” and “uhs” a-plenty. Also, when I die, just go ahead and carve the phrase “So anyway…” into my tombstone. It’s become abundantly clear that it’s what I wish to be remembered by. Shadow Warrior really is coming along nicely, though. It’s easily the bloodest game to ever bleed blood, and the sword-fu is like fast food chili: chunky, satisfying, and made up primarily of disembodied limbs. I doubt it’ll take home any Game Of The Year awards when the dust settles, but it’s big, loud, and dumb enough (in a sort of smart way) that you should probably take notice. My enthusiasm doesn’t come across as well in the video as I’d have liked, but I did have a fun – though certainly not perfect – time with the couple hours I played. View 30-or-so scattered minutes of it below. (P.S. If you hate my voice, well, it’s actually impossible for you to hate it as much as I do. So!)

Only now I’ve done a video, for some reason. It’s in the vein of those Let’s Play things that are all over YouTube, tt’s my first one ever, and I’m well aware it’s pretty shonky on both a content and technical level. I wanted to give this a shot regardless of outcome, to see what it’s like and to see what I can learn. In it, I play one mission from the current build of Goldhawk Interactive’s indie X-COM homage Xenonauts, which is out now on Steam Early Access. I also talk pretty much non-stop for about 17 minutes, which I don’t believe is something I’ve ever done before in my life. My mum’d kill to have a conversation that long with me.Read the rest of this entry »